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Published to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the US entry into World War I in 1917, David Lubin’s Grand Illusions: American Art and World War I offers its reader much more than the book’s straightforward title suggests. Lubin’s foreign, filmic, postwar touchstone, Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La grande illusion, signals an unconventional history of American art of the period regarding media, chronological scope, and well-worn definitions of “American” art. In fact, the...
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1986, Sarajevo. Zvono rushes the field during a soccer match. For this performance, entitled Sport and Art, the band of artists sets up easels and begins to paint. They wear the colors of the opposing team. Once the paintings are complete, they run across the field and showcase them.1986, Turgovishte. In northern Bulgaria, three groups of artists perform parallel actions called The Road. Members of Dobrudzha, Turgovishte, and Ma paint their bodies and engage in...
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Ralph Ubl takes Max Ernst very seriously in unforeseen ways, not as a pasticheur of fashionable lines of thought—the fire bringer of Freud to Paris—and not as a great painter. This Ernst is more a dark mechanic dismantling the parts of painting (perspective, ground, picture plane, rectangle, contour), which then persist as a “repressed power” (7) in his painting, enigmatically but powerfully generating “effects of the unavailable” (6). What is at stake in the “unavailable” is...
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Darby English’s book 1971: A Year in the Life of Color hinges on two pairs of jarring pictures. One of the images is well known: a black-and-white photograph showing members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protesting in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in January 1971. The sandwich boards atop their overcoats brand an upcoming survey of contemporary art by black...
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In his latest engagement with print culture, Michael Gaudio demonstrates just how productive print culture’s modes of analysis continue to be. Given its rather predictable art-historical title, it may not be immediately evident that this is virtually the first full-length art-historical study of the Bible concordances produced at Little Gidding in England, unusual for deploying a process of collage in which fragments of printed images were reassembled into unconventional and puzzling...
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Eyal Peretz’s premise is that framed artworks, which include paintings, photographs, cinema, and theater, imply an out-of-frame or off-screen space. This is not the literal exterior surrounding the enframed work—the gallery wall on which a painting hangs, the rafters above the stage, the space beyond the bounds of the movie screen—but the world the artwork creates but does not happen to include within its frame. This off-screen or out-of-frame space is part of the artwork inasmuch as the...
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The essays in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity interrogate humor as a transcultural device used to address the thorny issue of racial, social, and political difference. Each of the book’s contributors carefully considers human representation and classification and how stereotypes are constructed through visual culture. One of the book’s coeditors, the late Angela Rosenthal, argues that visual humor must be rigorously examined because...
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Both frank and richly detailed, Sharon Louden’s broad collection contains forty concrete accounts, fascinating autobiographies in miniature, from artists describing the various ingenious means by which they strive to sustain “a creative life.” There are vital insights here, but often they beg further elaboration.Admittedly, Louden concedes a “hands-off” editorial approach, allowing contributors to speak with their own voices. Nevertheless, attempts are made to bind these accounts...
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The history of photography, film, and technology often builds its narratives around significant dates that seem to map precisely the beginning or end of certain developments in these media. The invention of photography in 1839 and the birth date of film in 1895 are such events, and historiography has repeatedly treated them with reference to one another. This dominant schema presents the development of instantaneous photography teleologically as a precursor to the projected...
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In this ambitious, generously illustrated, and beautifully produced book, Louis P. Nelson convincingly shows us that Jamaica and its architecture is not peripheral, but central to our understanding of the British Empire in the long eighteenth century (from 1692, the year of the Port Royal earthquake, to 1838, marking emancipation). Departing from the emphasis of many architectural histories of early modern Americas, Nelson focuses on the movement of people (whites and blacks), goods,...
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